For 200 years industrial civilization has relied on the combustion of abundant and cheap carbon fuels. But continued reliance has had perilous consequences. On the one hand there is the insecurity of relying on the world’s most unstable region – the Middle East – compounded by the imminence of peak oil, growing scarcity and mounting prices. On the other, the potentially cataclysmic consequences of continuing to burn fossil fuels, as the evidence of accelerating climate change shows.

"The Solar Economy", by one of the world's most effective analysts and advocates, lays out the blueprints of how political, economic and technological challenges of sustaniable energy can be met using indigenous, renewable and universally available resources, and the enormous opportunities and benefits that will flow from doing so.

Climate Change, pollution, deforestation, destruction of the ozone layer, poverty and the population explosion are all problems created or exacerbated by the use of conventional energy. Answers are now more urgently required than ever, and Hermann Scheer shows that this crisis may yet be reversed - but that this can only happen through a fundamental change in political and economic strategies, paving the way towards a global solar energy economy sustained by new social principles. This book champions the replacement of fossil and nuclear fuels with solar energy as a real solution to the threat to the environment and associated social consequences.